Since the rise of anti-vaccine propaganda, a very hot phrase online for people who believe in things that run contrary to accepted truths is
Do your own research
Let’s break down what these people seem to mean for a second.
Doing your own research when you’re in a medical or paramedical field means one of two things:
- Designing your own experiment and testing a hypothesis yourself
- Researching a “meta study” on the prevailing existing research on a topic and gathering the findings to point you to a conclusion on the trend in the results.
It does not mean “go find someone online who disagrees with what science has proven so far and take their word for it.”
Let’s look at how this scenario plays out with the current fake news trend:
If you truly believe that journalists have missed something in a story and required more research or “your own” research, this is what that would look like:
- Finding any and all named sources in previously published stories and talking to them again.
- Asking to see the publicly available information on the players, including but not limited to government records, arrest records, previous news mentions, anything pertinent to the case.
- Talking to experts in the field you’re trying to study and asking them to review testimony and any information you have already gathered.
It does not mean, again, doing a google search for “case name” and “conspiracy” and running with it.
It does not mean “believing this case is the same as another case from history because it fits your narrative”
It does not mean “taking TruthSeeker42069’s word for it that they are a police officer “working the case” and sharing the information with you online” (mostly because that’s the kind of thing that were it true would get a cop fired, and it’s never, ever true. Cops who want to break their silence do it to journalists as anonymous sources.)
It does not mean “taking everything you see, coupled with a story on the internet as being truthful.” The internet does not require fact checkers. News departments do, because people can and do sue them all the time.
If you’re not prepared to actually do the job a trained journalist does and possibly put yourself in harm’s way talking to hard-to-get sources, law enforcement sources, working with real whistleblowers, all while fighting your legal department for what you can and can not say, you’re not ACTUALLY “doing your own research.”
Journalists have access to databases that lay people do not. This is not some method of preventing people from accessing the information as much as it is about the integrity of the organizations that gather and compile information for repositories like JSTOR.
It costs money to gain access to JSTOR because it’s vetted and a truthful accounting of millions of clippings and sources that journalists can turn to and know that the information they are getting is credible.
Your google books search is not JSTOR.
Your message board is not JSTOR.
Research is hard. Research is tedious. Research can sometimes take YEARS to compile.
Your 10 minutes on Voat is not research.
The kind of work journalists do when they are conducting research isn’t just reading testimony or looking through source materials. It’s questioning the veracity of everything they read and testing the claims against other sources to see what holds up or what fits a timeline properly.
This is why journalists don’t report on conjecture.
This is why journalists don’t rely on confirmation bias.
Having research and understanding how to test it is why we have journalists and investigators.
Alex Jones is not an investigator.
Most “do your own research” types don’t even understand what confirmation bias is. Most of them do not understand what the Burden of Proof means.
How do you expect to get thoroughly vetted research that could stand up to peer review if the person “conducting” the research doesn’t understand what constitute confirmation bias or conjecture?
Unless you’re prepared to follow the correct method of gathering and evaluating evidence, you’re not “doing your own research.”
You’re “pretending to be a detective like the one you saw on TV.”
You’re not helping.
You’re just trying to make yourself feel good.
It’s not research.
It’s masturbation.